Asian Boys Volume Three : Poetic Brilliance

I am writing this right now in an almost drunkard state. I experienced the play just hours ago, just changed into my sleeping clothes and now is typing furiously just so I could write this commentary on what I believe to be one of the more profound contemporary gay plays ever written. If you have yet to watch the play, there might be spoilers, so if you wish to venture further, ample warning has been meted out.

Asian Boys Volume Three (ABVT) is an adaptation of the Singaporean Novel by Johann S. Lee, Peculiar Chris. The first act explores how the writers deals with being gay through the principal character, Chris. Here in act one, everything is ethereal. You have muses and masked angelic beings acting as background players and providing heavenly chorus throughout its entirety. Though the issues and problems troubling Chris are not light or frivolous in anyway, the execution of the first act do reflect the juvenile freedom and idealistic perception of how young Chris – and in some extend, how young gay men – view the world. Act One on its own, was enough for me.

Then enter Act Two. While Act One seems almost imaginary and dream like, Act Two brought me to a completely different place. In fact it brought me to a strangely and disturbingly familiar place. It brought the audience to a modern day, year 2007, Singapore, a society still struggling with the concept of basic human rights and dignity. Here is where all the political didactic begins. If we simplify Act One and say it deals with personal gay issues, Act Two then brings those personal issues and reflects them as political. Alfian Saat has brilliantly merge the two together - the Political is indeed Personal.

Watching Act Two, I kept thinking to myself, I should have brought my mum here. I should brought my straight friends here. I should have brought my ex-girlfriends here. This is because, Act Two, in all its brilliance, the issues it brought up are not new to most of the audience. There are of course certain issues that hits too close to home – like being apathetic to social issues and the obsession with looks and the physicality – but most of the message are already passé. Alfian Saat is preaching to the already converted.

But this is I suppose the weakness of stage theater in general. Trying to use theater as a platform for change is ineffective because theater do not have the broad appeal that cinema or television do. Just try to drag your homophobic straight friends to a gay play they have pay $50 for. It could indeed prove challenging.

I however do not believe Alfian Saat's agenda for the play was to incite change on a societal level. I believe he was merely reminding us, the already converted audience, to not get too comfortable with society. And that more work is still needed. There can be no better time than now for such a reminder. With all the talk about the government opening up to the gays, we must not for one second believe that Singapore is in a dawn of a new liberalization.

It's so easy to be disillusioned in Singapore – they don't enforce the 377a penal code, so why should we care? And sometimes even though we heard the message before, it needs to be repeated again. And Asian Boys Volume 3, does just that and more.